Google Analytics – What it is and Why You Should be Using It For Your Business
You may have an awesome website that attracts many visitors, but if you don’t know anything about those visitors, you could be wasting a lot of time, effort, and money targeting the wrong audience.
Knowing information about your visitors like where your users are from, what pages they are visiting and for how long, why and when they leave, is all important to help make informed decisions for targeted marketing campaigns and to optimize the content and architecture of your site.
This is where Google Analytics can be extremely valuable to you as a business owner because it gives you a clear snapshot of your visitors’ activity.
What exactly is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics service and dashboard around the globe. This free web analytics tool is a world-class service that helps measure the traffic of your website and gather important information about your website’s visitors and how they are performing. When you know what is working and what is not working for your website, you will know what steps you need to optimize your site and to provide engaging content that will fulfill your visitors’ needs.
How does it work?
You will need a Google account to get started, so before you do anything be sure to set that up. Then you can go ahead and sign your business up by filling out the various forms and information they require.
Next, Google Analytics will put tracking codes into the code of your website to collect data from the users that visit. These tracking codes will need to be installed on every page of your website that you would like to track. Adding these tracking codes varies depending on which platform you are using, so be sure to know which one you are on before getting started. For example, WordPress websites can use a Google Analytics Plugin to easily install the codes. HTML can be manually added, which would require basic HTML knowledge to do so.
What type of data does Google Analytics Track?
There are two different ways Google Analytics can collect data:
1.) User Acquisition Data – this is data about your visitors before they visit your website. Things like age, gender, interests, where they are coming from etc.
2.) User Behavior Data – information about your users when they visit your website. For example, how long a user stayed on your website and where their points of entry and exit are, which can help you to improve your website so more users end up converting.
Starting a Google Analytics account can feel extremely overwhelming, but just know that this amazing and powerful service is an indispensable tool for your online presence.